The use of reinforced composites made of particulate fillers or reinforcing fibers is already known. The state-of-the-art fiber reinforced composites yield high strength properties and by selecting the multiphase resin matrix for the composite, the handling characteristics of the composite can be considerably improved.
On the other hand, a lot of development has occurred with bioactive materials, namely bioactive ceramics and glass and sol-gel processed silica. These materials can be used to achieve attachment of e.g. bone to a biomaterial surface after the material has been put in contact with tissue. An additional advantage of bioactive glass is its antimicrobial effect on the microbes existing for instance in infected sinuses of a bone. Document WO 2004/049904 discloses bioactive, resorbable scaffolds for tissue engineering. The scaffolds are made of bioactive glass meshes that comprise interwoven bioactive glass fibers and may comprise incubating cells such as fibroblasts and chondroblasts.
From a surgical perspective, individual replacement of bone, cartilage and soft tissues are insufficient in tumour, traumatologic and tissue reconstruction surgery despite the increasing advances in biomaterials research and their clinical application methods and tissue engineering. The need and indications for development of new kinds of materials result from disadvantages of the use of allografts. Risks for transmittable diseases (HIV, Creutzfeld-Jacob's disease, etc.) are related to allografting. Metals are not bioactive or osteoconductive, and their use results in stress shielding phenomena and bone atrophy of the adjacent bone. Metal implants cause also severe problems in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when diagnosing diseases of patients. These main disadvantages are well documented in large clinical series.
There thus still exists a need for alternative implants for medical uses.